1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a method and system for securely identifying an authorized user for the purposes of updating Point of Interest (POI) field and record information and associating position information to both wired and wireless IP addresses.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, POI information is available to people by means of telephone books, both hardcopies and online web versions, and typically represents business and individual information, such as telephone number, street address, city, state, zip code, amongst other categories specific to various POIs. Governing communication organizations, such as telephone companies, typically collect, update, and slowly disseminate this information to a wide variety of people for various applications. Additionally, other organizations collect telephone books from various telephone companies and compile this information in an all encompassing master list of various POIs, such as in the white pages, which consists of listings of individuals and businesses, such as restaurants, golf courses facilities, movie theaters, etc. Current POI collection primarily involves a ‘rake’ collection method, where information is initially documented from various organizations, typically from an organization where a telephone line is installed, and then gathered, or ‘raked’ together from these initial databases.
This method of collecting information about individuals and POIs is not very reliable, since updated telephone books, for example, are typically released only once a year. Currently, individuals can update their information at a local database, such as a telephone book, by calling their respective telephone company and updating their information. This update will not be visible in their telephone book typically for at most a year. An online Internet search system, such as Switchboard.com or Smartpages.com, allows individuals to update their listed information by registering at the search system's website, by providing their e-mail address, entering the updated information, and acknowledging that they are either (a) the person whose listing they wish to modify or (b) an authorized agent of the person whose listing they wish to modify. An e-mail is sent to the e-mail address supplied by the individual that requested the update, and once the individual replies to the e-mail or clicks on a URL in the body of the e-mail, the specified listing information is updated in the online directory server's database. This method does not check the requesting individual's authenticity or authorization over the individual whose information is being updated. With the advent of free anonymous e-mail addresses, any individual can spoof this method and system to fraudulently steal or change another person's identity.
For instance, an individual that updates this system could be a person of deception or moral turpitude who may want to steal another person's identity. This deceptive person, using an anonymous e-mail address, such as provided by Hotmail.com, could update an unsuspecting person's telephone number information on an online directory. When other people see the unsuspecting, innocent person's name on the online directory, they may then be re-directed to the telephone number or other information, such as the mailing address, that may have been changed by the deceptive person. Currently, this updating or removal process is only available for individual persons, not businesses, and provides no guarantee that individuals requesting changes are actually who they seem to represent.
Additionally, businesses change their names, addresses, telephone numbers, etc., as a business grows, through a merger or acquisition, or for any of a multitude of other reasons. Various POI category data associated with businesses is used for various purposes, such as customers wanting to locate a particular business based on their current location and hours of operation.
It is important for businesses to keep their listing information as accurate as possible and to have this update be reflected as quickly as possible in a customer-accessible database, so as to drive more potential customers to the business. Current, prior art systems, such as that provided by InfoUSA.com, allows business listings to be updated through a lengthy process, which can typically take between 30 to 60 days. This process typically begins with an authorized business person logging-on to the InfoUSA.com website and updating the POI information by providing required fields, such as the business name, telephone number, address, city, state, and zip code. An InfoUSA.com authorized representative then contacts the business, after the typical 30 to 60 day period, to verify and update the information. This prevents a business from quickly updating its critical POI information for consumers to utilize, thus reducing the amount of potential business that the information update could have enabled, such as when a business changes its telephone number or address.
Additionally, as more mobile devices become available, the need for providing routes or driving directions from the device's current location to a desired POI destination, such as a restaurant, is becoming commonplace. Thus, POIs, such as businesses, will want to differentiate themselves from their competitors as much as possible by providing potential customers with additional information about them, such as URLs or web addresses.
Current prior art POI databases, such as telephone books or online telephone directories, do not enable businesses to securely or quickly update various POI information, such as their web address. The use of mobile devices, such as network-enabled wireless cellular telephones, will allow consumers to search for nearby POIs, such as restaurants. Consumers may then want to conveniently view an online menu from their restaurant POI search. This requires POI data to incorporate not just contact information, such as telephone number and address, but other information associated with their business, such as a web address or URLs. Since the Internet is so dynamic, businesses may change web addresses periodically, such as in the case of a small business owner using a free online web-hosting site that may periodically change the web address.
Business web addresses (i.e., URL's) would typically change more frequently than other business POI fields, such as a business name or telephone number. As another example of requiring various POIs to update or change their web address periodically, when a franchise or chain has a single top-level domain representing the entire franchise or chain, there may be various internal websites for individual POI storefronts of the franchise or chain. It is essential, and currently not possible, for individual POIs of the franchise or chain to be able to quickly and easily update their POI information, such as their particular web address or URL, in order to enable consumers to access as much information about the business as possible in order to attract increased business.
The growth and design of the Internet has caused millions upon billions of needed Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to be allocated. The current internetworking protocol, under the IPv4 format, allows for a potential of 2{circle around ( )}32 (over 4.29 billion) possible mutually exclusive IP address combinations. The new internet working protocol, IPv6, provides a potential of 2{circle around ( )}128 (over 3.4*10{circle around ( )}29 billion) possible mutually exclusive IP address combinations. A problem exists in that there is no current accurate method that enables the controlling users of IP addresses to map their IP address information to position information (e.g., latitude and longitude).
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is a non-profit organization established for the purpose of administration and registration of IP numbers for the following geographical areas: 1). North America, 2). South America, 3). Caribbean, and 4). sub-Saharan Africa. ARIN is one of three Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) worldwide which collectively provide IP registration services to all regions around the globe. The others are: 1). Reseaux Internet Protocol Europeens (RIPE NCC)-(regions include Europe, Middle East, and parts of Africa), and 2). Asia Pacific Network. Information Center (APNIC)-(regions include Asia Pacific).
ARIN was established to allocate or assign Internet Protocol (IP) address space to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and to end-users. A distinction is made between address allocation and address assignment, i.e., ISPs are “allocated” address space, while end users are “assigned” address space. ISPs are allocated blocks of IP addresses for the purpose of assigning that space to their customers, while end users receive assignments of IP addresses exclusively for use in their own operational networks. IP addresses are distributed in a tree distribution architecture, where one organization provides a large block of IP addresses to an organization beneath it, which provides IP addresses to users or organizations beneath it, and this process continues until end-users (or IP address end-nodes) have been assigned IP addresses for their use. The minimum block of IP address space assigned by ARIN is 4,096. All organizations that require allocations of fewer than 4,096 IP addresses must request the address space from their upstream IP address provider, such as an ISP.
When IP addresses are allocated to organizations (i.e., ARIN, ISPs, etc.), a record is stored of each ‘owner’ of the block of IP addresses, which can typically be viewed and accessed through a WHOIS database search. One example that illustrates how a typical block of allocated IP addresses is recorded in a publicly-accessible WHOIS database, is shown in Table 1. Given that a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) business user, who has a static IP address number 168.103.86.33, is located at 515 S. Madison Avenue Suite 738 in Pasadena, Calif., Table 1 shows the results of a WHOIS database search for the IP address 168.103.86.33.
TABLE 1Output from ARIN WHOIS SearchWHOIS Search Query for IP Address 168.103.86.33US WEST Communications Services (NET-OMAHAIVDS)600 Stinson BlvdMinneapolis, MN 55413USNetname: OMAHAIVDSNetblock: 168.103.0.0 - 168.103.255.255Coordinator:Bechard, Keith   (KB46-ARIN)keithb@ADVTECH.USWEST.COM(303) 541-6766Domain System inverse mapping provided by:NS1.INTERPRISE.NET   204.147.80.6NS2.INTERPRISE.NET   168.103.8.1NS3.INTERPRISE.NET   207.224.192.1Record last updated on 21 Aug. 2000.Database last updated on 16 Aug. 2001 23:00:27 EDT.
As illustrated in Table 1, the assignee of the IP address is US West Communication Services, which acts as an ISP. The WHOIS search indicates that the location of the IP address 168.103.86.33 is at 600 Stinson Boulevard, Minneapolis, Minn. 55413, yet the actual location of the IP address, where it is actually connected to an end-device, is 515 S: Madison Avenue Suite 738 in Pasadena, Calif. The driving distance between the two locations is approximately 1991 miles, with an estimated travel time of 25.5 hours.
Thus, there is no current way to provide to end-users the exact and most up-to-date position information correlated to an IP address. Conventional systems use various techniques, such as the WHOIS database search, to associate position information with IP address. These methods, however, are very inaccurate and provide a large degree of position error. Other techniques include:                1. Running a WHOIS Database Search (example provide above).        2. Using a reverse DNS lookup to find out the host's name:                    a. As an example, given the IP address 132.74.18.2, a Domain Name Server (DNS) lookup translates the address to “construct.haifa.ac.il”, which provides various hints, such as that the Top-Level Domain (TLD) is “.il”, which implies that the host is in Israel. Additionally, the next two domains are haifa.ac, implying that the host belongs to the ‘haifa’ academia institute. The Haifa University happens to be in the city of Haifa, thus the IP address position information is in Haifa.            b. Another example is, given the IP address 128.149.22.146, a DNS lookup translates the address to “b238-edge-g3-0-1.jpl.nasa.gov”, which also provides various hints, such as that the TLD “.gov” represents that the host is at a government facility (i.e., in the US). Additionally, the “jpl.nasa” implies that the host belongs to Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which belongs also to NASA. Looking up the location of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in a separate address database reveals that it has an address of 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, Calif., 91109. Looking at the “b238-edge-g3-0-1” implies that the location of the IP address is in Building 238 at JPL. This naming convention, however, is esoteric and only staff or IT members at JPL would probably know what it illustrates.                        3. Using a trace route program, since IP is based on a packet switched system, to determine approximate locations of routes between the two end-point IP addresses. The names of the routers through which packets flow from the origin host to the destination host might provide various hints of the geographical path (i.e. locations through which the packets flow), and of the final destination's physical location. For example, running a trace route program from Pasadena, Calif. to www.mit.edu yields the follow output:                    1 * * * Request timed out.            2 40 ms 50 ms 40 ms brbndslgw1PoolA254.brbn.qwest.net [168.103.228.254]            3 40 ms 50 ms 40 ms bur-edge-02.inet.qwest.net [205.171.13.153]            4 50 ms 51 ms 50 ms svl-core-01.inet.qwest.net [205.171.5.219]            5 50 ms 50 ms 50 ms sjo-core-01.inet.qwest.net [205.171.5.99]            6 60 ms 50 ms 50 ms sfo-core-02.inet.qwest.net [205.171.5.123]            7 110 ms 120 ms 111 ms jfk-core-01.inet.qwest.net [205.171.5.113]            8 110 ms 120 ms 111 ms p3-3.nycmny1-cr8.bbnplanet.net [4.24.187.13]            9 120 ms 121 ms 120 ms p6-0.bstnma1-br1.bbnplanet.net [4.24.6.49]            10 120 ms 121 ms 130 ms p6-1.cambridge1-nbr2.bbnplanet.net [4.0.6.245]            11 120 ms 120 ms 130 ms p10-0-0.mit2.bbnplanet.net [4.1.80.10]            12 120 ms 130 ms 130 ms NW12-RTR-BACKBONE.MIT.EDU [18.168.0.16]            13 130 ms 130 ms 120 ms DANDELION-PATCH.MIT.EDU [18.181.0.31]            Hence, it is possible to see all of the routers in between the two end points of Pasadena, Calif. and www.mit.edu using a trace route program, and by using the WHOIS database find their approximate locations.                        4. Analyzing naming conventions of ISPs and Internet backbone connections.                    a. AT&T Dialups: <port>.<router-location>.<state>.dial-access.aft.net            b. UU.net Dialups: <port>.<device>.<city>.<state>.<iu>.uu.net :<port>.<device>.<airport>.<iu>.uu.net                        
Thus, it is possible using this method to determine the location of a router for various ISPs and backbone connections down to the City, State, or specific Airport location. For an actual location, i.e., an exact address, this naming convention proves insufficient.
In order to obtain an accurate mapping of IP address to geographical location using these current methods, there would have to be a WHOIS directory for every individual IP address. This is impossible since only large blocks (i.e., 4,096 or greater) of IP addresses are provided to site coordinators or system administrators of ISPs, typically. The other potential most accurate solution is provided by record extension to DNS described in RFC 1876. This extension allows system administrators the ability to update their DNS records with location information of varying resolution. Another attempt to express a host's geographical location via DNS records is done in RFC 1712. Both RFCs (i.e., 1712 and 1876) define a DNS Resource Record (RR) allowing the storage of IP-related geographical location information.
The problem exists in that most system administrators responsible for DNS records have tens of thousands of records they would have to update, thus proving that the association of position information to IP addresses is a difficult, if not impossible, undertaking for such an administrator or team of administrators. Most ISPs are responsible for more than 65,536 routable IP addresses. These IP addresses are used for both static and dynamic IP address assignments. From an ISP's perspective, it would be practically impossible to associate position information to every static IP address. Another drawback of the current DSN location record method is that a majority of users may not want to have their position information associated with their IP addresses for public viewing, as provided by current DSN records (i.e., RFC 1712 and 1875).
Wireless devices are well know in the art, and are used in both Local Area Network (LAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN) systems. Typical wireless device standards well known in the art include Bluetooth and WiFi (802.11b), among others. These wireless devices are typically connected through a gateway or bridge device that provides the wireless devices with Internet access. These wireless gateways or bridges have either static or dynamic routable or non-routable (e.g., 192.168.168.168) IP addresses. There is an immediate need for wireless devices with Internet access to be able to get their approximate position information based on the IP address of the gateway device through which they connect to the Internet, with the positional accuracy depending primarily on the range capability of the wireless gateway device.
Thus a need exits for a method and system that allows POI owners to instantaneously update or create their POI information, such as web address information, securely, quickly, and reliably. Additionally, a need exists for owners (such as renters of leasers) of IP addresses, such as a POI owner, to associate its IP address with the POI's position information. This would prove especially useful for network IP endpoints, in which only authorized users or clients can use and view their position information without the need for positioning devices, such as a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) device. This provides a great advantage for wireless devices that have small coverage zones, since they would be able to obtain their approximate position information without the need for an expensive GPS add-on device, and in most cases, with about the same, or better, positional accuracy as a commercial GPS device can provide.